Motives And Characteristics Of Morality In George Orwell's Stories
Death is coming for us all. It could be today, or tomorrow, or fifty years from now; no one really knows when or how. We all have our ideals of how we would like to go. Some people want to go in the company of family at an old age, and some want to go out in a ‘blaze of glory’ as cliché as that sounds. Regardless of how we imagine our deaths they are one of the only true certainties we have in life. Death not only affects the subject of the action, but also those around the subject, both physically and emotionally. That is one concept that George Orwell elaborates on in a multitude of his works.
In both A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant death is a main theme. Death, however, does not come easy. I will attempt to analyze and deconstruct the concept of death and how it effects the narrator and people who experience it, particularly from a moral standpoint.
In A Hanging by George Orwell a man is hung. We do not know this man, nor do we know the crimes that he committed. All we know is that he is hung and that the prison guards and executioner pass off the death as ‘just another everyday thing’(A Hanging 1). That simple fact has shocked readers for generations. Death is no small and insignificant task, as the police officers seem to portray it, but should be something tragic and special. Why then, do these officers take death as a grain of sand?
One theory as to why the police officers reacted so ‘positively’ to the death of the prisoner is because the officers were not emotionally aware. They did not, nor did they ever personally know this man. They never had a reason to get to know him. They did not know about any of his family, or friends. They were not aware of the people whose life’s he impacted in a positive manner. The only knowledge that these officers had of this man was his crime and what he looked like. No more. No less. To them he was just another bad person, so why should they feel attached to him whatsoever? This brings us to the concept of emotional awareness.
Emotional awareness is a cognitive theory that takes the quality of an emotion over the quantity of an emotion. Breaking that down, for example, if something causes pain it can be classified in two separate ways. One way is classification by quality, meaning what is the type of pain? There can be the pain of getting a papercut, or the pain of losing a family member. The pain of losing someone loved is obviously the greater quality pain.
Classifying via quantification is comparing the amount of pain; losing one family member versus losing seven family members (Lane 2).There is a lapse of morality in these certain death penalty situations. The idea of is one life worth more than another, regardless of the crimes comes into play. It allows for us to not only view the wrongs in our societal system but also allows for a better grasp on the concept of morality. The taking of one’s life is no light matter, after all.
Many people do not understand how the prison guards possess no emotional sadness or sympathy. The only way analysts can explain this phenomenon is by using the concept of moral disengagement. Moral disengagement, in laymen's terms, is when a person puts the act out of mind as to not condemn themselves. This is of temporary relief, and however, in most cases these same people tend to face detrimental consequences later. For the short time being though, while an act is being committed, unattaching one's self is often the only way to keep a clean conscious and stay in line with moral standards (Ofosky 1).
Moving on to another famous story by George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant. In Shooting an Elephant a police officer in European occupied Burma is faced with quite a difficult decision. He must choose between doing what he thinks is morally right and doing what he thinks will please a crowd of angry Burmans. In the end, spoiler alert, he kills an elephant and we, the readers, are then forced to endure the gruesome and lengthy death of a majestic and alluring beast (Shooting 3).The narrator of the story is facing what seems to be a conflict that can be taken in two varying ways. He is conflicted about what to do with the elephant.
The first type of conflict is a literal physical conflict. On one hand he could wait for the owner of the elephant to make an appearance and let the owner take care of his beast and make reparations for the damage the great beast caused. Or he could choose to shoot the elephant and end its rampage on the town. The other, more philosophical, way of interpreting the conflict is by making it a moral conflict. This conflict goes much deeper than the more physical and literal conflict.
This conflict deals with the very nature of right and wrong and peels back the layers of the human mind; revealing a person's true nature and desires versus what is expected of him (Foot 380). In relation to the story, the moral conflict that the narrator faces deals with what he wishes to do with the elephant, which is not shoot it and wait for the owner, and what the crowd of Burmans wants him to do with the elephant, completely obliterate it with gunfire. The narrator ultimately gives into the rambunctious crowd and kills the elephant, and in that act, he may have committed a moral wrong.
Of course, that all depends of the ag- old question of whether or not animals are morally accountable. Moral accountability is when something is able of being held responsible for an act. Obviously, humans are morally accountable, and it is debated on whether some animals can be put into this category. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether or not the elephant in this circumstance was aware of its actions. In this case it is believed that the elephant, and all animals, are not morally accountable. But why? Well, for example, animals are either male or female and are never considered man or woman. An animal is killed, but a person is murdered. It is these little factors that differ humans from beasts and make sed beasts morally unaccountable (Peterson 7). Therefore, since elephants are not considered morally accountable then that means that our Burman police officer narrator did not commit a moral wrong in shooting the elephant, even though the act was described in such a vulgar and inhumane way.
Since we now have an understanding of the narrator’s moral constitution, we now need to look at the character of the second party present at the shooting. The Burmans. The Burmans were all for shooting the elephant from the very start. Some were probably seeking revenge for the elephant destroying their town and murdering an innocent man, but others where just in it for the sport of killing. Regardless of motives, the fact is they wanted to see that elephant die. The same question is then posed, are the people of Burma wrong for wanting the elephant dead and are by then committing a moral wrong? Even though the answer to the question when applied to the narrator is no, in this case the answer is yes. T
he Burmans did not pull the trigger, however their influence of the narrator caused the moral conflict that resulted in the elephant’s death. But how? If the elephant is not morally accountable, then how can the Burmans be convicted of a moral wrong? The answer to that is because they held influence over the narrator’s decision and ultimately were morally responsible for him committing the act (Benedict 64). Now that we have thoroughly analyzed the highs and lows of both papers we can begin to seek out the similarities and differences between the two extraordinary pieces. First, we will identify and analyze the similarities between the works. For starters they are set in the same time era and place, during Britain's imperialistic rule over India and similar countries, Burma in both cases.
A second similarity between the two is that both stories, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging, take place in first person and feature the narrator as a disgruntled police officer who is extremely torn between his hatred of his imperialistic government and his utter disgust of the people of Burma. Obviously, a main concept, or theme, in both tales is death. The use of first- person narration, however, gives us a detailed and gory account of the deaths in both stories while also giving us a sting of the human emotion that tends to go along with death.
Both stories also give us a behind-the-scenes look at what other’s reactions are to death, not necessarily their emotions, but rather their actions, and allows us to feel the narrator’s reaction to their mannerisms after witnessing death. Both contain symbols of death. In A Hanging there is the dog, and in Shooting an Elephant there is the gun actually used to kill the creature. One main similarity between the two is Orwell’s use of death as a metaphor for the intrusive imperialistic rule. In Shooting an Elephant the elephant represents the people of Burma and the narrator, and gun, Britain's government. I
n A Hanging, the prisoner represents the Burmese and the executioner Britain.There are many more differences between the two excerpts than there are similarities. Perhaps the biggest difference being the fact that in one story an elephant is being killed and in the other it is a real human-being, in this case a prisoner. The life of a human is significantly more valuable than that of an elephant, however, in comparing the two, the death of the elephant aroused far more emotion than the death of the inmate. Sorrow and grief and complete despair was felt for the elephant and more sadness and confusion for the prisoner. Another difference was the narrator’s role in each.
In Shooting an Elephant the narrator was the actual person in charge of killing the beast; in A Hanging the narrator was not the executioner himself, but rather an unwilling bystander to the fatal act. A third, quite significant, difference is the use of moral construct in each story. Shooting an Elephant focus’s more on the concepts of moral accountability and responsibility. It analyzes the act of taking a life from a first-person viewpoint. It puts the readers in the narrator’s shoes and allows for a sense of emotion that a third person point of view would not be able to encompass.
The viewpoint chosen makes the reader feel, somewhat, morally responsible. The moral construct used in A Hanging comes at us from an opposite angle. This time, through the narrator, we are a bystander witnessing an action. Unable to feel the emotion of the prisoner or executioner, but instead viewing the situation as a whole. An advantage to this viewpoint is readers are not clouded by the emotion of the narrator.After thoroughly analyzing and researching both Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging it has been found that there is a lot more beneath the surface than what may first appear. If the time and effort is put into actually ‘reading between the lines’ we can begin to see the truth of the stories.
On the surface they may seem like a story about someone killing an elephant and a prisoner getting the death penalty, but they are really about deciphering and determining the very motives and characteristics of morality and what is perceived as right and wrong in relation to death. Inevitable and unpredictable. Death is coming for us all and however it may come we shall welcome and accept it, and hopefully our deaths will be morally right and just, in every sense of the word.
